jane dark's sugarhigh!: A Difficult Biscuit

August 27, 2004

A Difficult Biscuit

Suppose you are on strike. You collate the time cards at a battery factory, and you love the people you work with. You know them. But you are not the only people on strike. In fact, yours started in sympathy with the strike at the auto factory, and you know them too: you know, exactly, how their shoulders ache by the end of the day, how their eyes run, how they come home to tired to play with their kids.

And the public transportation workers, the railway workers, the trash collectors -- they’re on strike too. You are on strike together and you have agreed, with these people you love, on some basic demands. You will not quit the strike until they are met. You’ve made this a promise to each other.

The basic demands include, let’s say, just these: that everyone will have quality medical coverage. That everyone who can gets to sit down while working, and that those who can’t will have the right to rotate jobs. That childcare will be provided equally to anyone who requests it.

These are your basic demands, and it seems fair to insist also that no funds will be generated to meet these demands by wringing more profits from workers at other factories. In fact, your demands go for all factories. Everyone gets this stuff. Oh, and just for the hell of it, a demand that doesn’t cost anyone a penny: anyone can marry anyone else. And no more executions.

You are on strike and the union, which claims to represent your interests, which in fact exists because you called it into being to care for you in such situations, sends a rep to your factory. The rep says, “We can’t do that. It’s not possible. Here’s what we can get for you: a 2.5% raise. An extra week’s vacation every other year. The right to retire early for a lesser pension. About the rest, there’s little we can do. We’re really sorry, we’d like to help you. Maybe two judges will retire in the next couple years, and we’ll get to appoint the replacements. Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re supporting the whole marry-who-you-want thing. Nope, not us. And sometimes, you just gotta give people posion injections.

“Oh, yeah,” concludes the union rep. “This offer is really only good for the factories we control in this country -- in fact, only some of them -- and we may have to move a lot of your jobs to factories we control in other countries.

“Take it or leave it.”

The comments box is open.

Posted by jane at August 27, 2004 07:28 AM | TrackBack

Comments

if anyone asks if you're done rebelling... say no...link arms...stand your ground

Posted by: mary at August 28, 2004 09:06 AM

yeah.

Has anyone here in the peanut gallery seen "Harlan County, USA"?

here's a link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/

You could easily come away from the film with the impression that if your union leadership doesn't work for you, then you fire them and get new union leadership.

Then again, the same director made another film ten years later, called American Dream
(linky: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099028/ )

and the conclusion that one would come to after watching that film is that there's absolutely no hope after the union tells you "We can't do it."

See, there are two approaches to this discussion- one is that the richest countries in the world can afford for their workers to have decent working conditions and good lives. The other approach is to point out that there are more people living in slums now than there were on the whole planet at the time of the french revolution... and our standard of living, those of us with internet connections and toilets that flush and cars, we're in the twilight of our ability to live the way that we do while the rest of the world stitches our Nikes together.

I am in the middle of hashing through this argument for myself every day, not just because I like to argue with myself, but because I have written something, a creative something, that people are starting to want to put money into, and make something out of, and it's about exactly this... and my own emotions about it are fairly..... conflicted.

OK, I have added almost nothing of value to this discussion....

Next?

Posted by: patrick at August 29, 2004 09:20 PM

A general strike.. an election.. a general strike.. an election..

I think I would work to make the strike as general as possible -- if half the workers don't back the strike then how can the other half keep them from crossing the picketline. Or rather, if management spends years working to convince my fellow workers that in fact I don't love them..

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